What! Clothes you can wear

Page Tools

Related

At last there's a catwalk parading clothes for real women, writes Caroline Overington.

A COUPLE of years ago, the New York Post decided to have a bit of fun with the city's Fashion Week. It put a classic picture of a sulky model on its front page. She was wearing a white helmet with antennae. There were more photos inside of models wearing things that were equally bizarre.

"Are they serious?" screamed the headline, capturing a great deal about New York Fashion Week. To the huddled masses, it can look like a lot of angular people with prominent rib cages flouncing and scowling and wearing things that look like rags, or bags, or airport luggage tags.

But not this year.

This year, the world's fashion writers, or fashionistas, as they like to call themselves, have declared the big week a great success because it featured clothes that - get this - people might actually wear.

Over eight days, hundreds of models sashayed down catwalks in Manhattan and some had on dresses that looked quite pretty. They had tops and bottoms and bits in the middle, quite a change from the dresses with nipple holes or the whole front cut out that were all the rage at Fashion Week a few years ago.

There were models in jeans, too. Everybody can wear jeans. And there were models in demure, knee-length skirts. Again, this was a relief to women, who couldn't believe it when designers last year tried to bring back the micro mini-skirt. There were also very few bare bellies.

In a news item titled "Slutwear goes out of fashion", CNN explained why: fashion is apparently a pendulum and it is swinging from low-slung pants that flash the G-string and navel-bearing tops to tight-fitting twin-sets just like girls wore in the 1950s.

"The slut is out now. She's dead," said Godfrey Deeny, senior fashion critic at Fashion Wire Daily. The new look is "very ladylike". Designers have possibly taken the lead from a new crop of film actors, like the southern belle Reese Witherspoon. Pop stars like Britney Spears - who barely wears any clothes - look a little rank next to these divas.

There was only one Australian label on the official schedule, perhaps because it can cost about $150,000 to put on a show.

Sydney designers Heidi Middleton and Sarah-Jane Clarke, of sass & bide, bit the bullet, and sent models down the runway wearing feathered head dresses, thigh-high boots and elbow pads.

Not everybody liked it: Women's Wear Daily, which is something of a style bible, said sass & bide's hanky-hemmed mini-skirts were "virtually unwearable". But The Telegraph from London said they were "hip".

A lot of the fashion on show was entirely unobjectionable - so much so that The New York Times fashion writer, Cathy Horyn, objected. "There is something unsettling about all the prettiness on the runway," she said. "All the sugar-coated clothes present a narrow view of the world."

But even Horyn couldn't help herself. She praised Marc Jacobs for designing clothes that were "very beautiful and cheerful".

That might depend on your point of view, of course. According to Horyn's report, Jacobs's "boxy tweed jackets" came in "blurred pink and green houndstooth" with "paper-bagged trousers in cotton stripes and gingham checks".

There is not a working woman in New York who would be seen dead in this. As everybody knows, New York women wear black. They have done ever since they heard that it made them look slimmer.

This year, like every year, someone was trying to promote the new black. Some said it would be animal prints. It might also be white.

If there was a winner at Fashion Week, it was Ralph Lauren, who sent fabulous-looking blondes down the runway in floor-length satin, fluffy cashmere, tulle and organza, all of it in ivory. "This was very pretty," Cindi Leive, editor-in-chief of Glamour magazine, said. "It was all one idea [white] but those dresses were so gorgeous. We'll see them on so many celebrities this spring." The New York Times was having none of it. Writer Jessica Seigel said she wouldn't give up basic black for any colour. "Black is slimming, it doesn't show dirt and it looks good even in cheaper fabrics."

Black carries power, and the little black dress can carry you anywhere. That is why nobody actually believes that there will ever be a "new black".

For evidence, look at Donna Karan, who helped make black popular. For the second year in a row, she paraded almost no black, but her stores are full of it.

"I will never say anything against black," she told The New York Times.